The Essence of the Miracle, Lesson 5

This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.

🔗 Link to the original lecture

🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Because that’s a conspiracy. They agreed together to make up Julius Caesar—what’s the problem? Somebody told the story. No, again. Something like that obviously strengthens the case, but maybe you have that here too. There are traditions that come from different directions and so on. You can also generate corroborating evidence from several directions here. And still I say: fine, it could still be that in the end this thing was planted in one way or another. Now this argument from historical events is a problematic argument, because historical events—why shouldn’t they happen? Fine, if someone tells me there was a Julius Caesar, let there be one, and if it was his cousin named Pompey, then let it be Pompey, what do I care? It’s not something that’s hard to accept as having happened. But when people tell me about miracles or impossible things.

[Speaker E] Like the Holocaust, which is so unimaginable that someone would say it couldn’t have happened.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, and that’s why I’m saying: the less plausible something is, the more the question arises whether it wasn’t planted. The possibility of planting always exists, only you need—you know, like in criminal law—you need motive, and you need capability. Meaning, you need suspicion. In other words: suspicion, motive, and capability. Suspicion arises from the fact that there’s something here that isn’t plausible. Motive—you have to look for a motive, otherwise why would anyone do such a thing? And you need capability, meaning that someone could actually pull something like that off even if he wanted to. Okay? Just like in criminal law, we’re basically dealing here with the laws of evidence.

[Speaker D] So the capability—

[Speaker B] A historical fact—you say he died. What does capability mean?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The pyrotechnics of the Sinai revelation—tell me, who has the capability to produce pyrotechnics like that?

[Speaker B] Julius Caesar is actually a good example, because today what most people know about Julius Caesar comes from Shakespeare. That’s planting.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s not from findings… from Shakespeare. Slowly, slowly, it could become only Shakespeare, and at some stage people are already convinced that it’s something historical, and they’ll tell you that yes, there was a Julius Caesar and so on. That can happen.

[Speaker D] But if we go back to the example of the Sinai revelation—why? Here too you can surely plant invented stories about a historical figure.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] A figure who acted in front of masses of people?

[Speaker D] With—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Battles conducted by thousands of fighters?

[Speaker D] Here, my father never told me, and neither did my grandfather or his father, that he was present in the Senate when Julius Caesar—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] He wasn’t present at the Sinai revelation either. He tells you that his father—same with Julius Caesar, he tells you that his father… same with Julius Caesar, he tells you that his father was a soldier in Julius Caesar’s army. Of course I wasn’t there; obviously not—I lived thousands of years later. What does that have to do with anything? It’s exactly the same thing. Exactly the same thing. What’s the difference?

[Speaker B] It’s like how everyone in the United States will tell you that his grandfather was on the Mayflower. And they say that if you add up all the people who claim to have been there, there’s no chance there was enough room.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Never mind. In any case, these claims are claims that require treatment. There’s a problem, as I said before, that arises when the content of the testimony is implausible. Where the content of the testimony is implausible—like some miracle, pyrotechnics, or whatever—then a question starts to arise about both elements. Here the two elements already connect: both the element of the source and the element of transmission. Even if I was there, maybe someone deceived me, maybe someone lied to me, maybe that’s one thing. Second, maybe none of it ever happened, nobody was deceived and nothing was preserved; the story was simply planted in history. And all of this begins from the fact that there’s some story here which on its face is implausible—a miracle or things we’re not generally used to happening—so suspicion arises. Once suspicion arises, you begin checking the…

[Speaker E] Or it’s plausible, but someone has a motive to invent it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I said that, yes. Suspicion, motivation, motive, and capability—those are always the parameters you have to examine. In any case, there’s also David Hume’s well-known argument about miracles, and that argument is two sentences long, and a huge amount has been written about it. I mean, there’s a lot of philosophical material for and against. It’s an interesting argument. It looks sort of trivial, but when you think about it, it’s an interesting argument; there are even more precise statistical formulations of it. The claim basically says this: We are asked to examine a book—now I’m quoting from the book, from David Hume’s words. We are asked to examine a book written almost certainly long after the sequence of events it describes, which has no support from contemporary testimony, and whose subject closely resembles the marvelous events by which every nation describes its beginnings. Let every man place his hand on his heart and say whether he thinks that the falsehood of such a book, supported by such evidence, is a more special and marvelous matter than all the miracles described in it. There’s a very interesting claim here. In other words, he says that the credibility of the book itself is not… again. He says: let every man place his hand on his heart and say whether he thinks that the falsehood of such a book, supported by such evidence, is a more special and marvelous matter than all the miracles described in it. He’s basically saying this: miracles are implausible that they happened. You say, okay, but it’s written in a book. Maybe the book is false? No, it’s not plausible that the book is false. Fine—but it’s also not plausible that a miracle happened. So now you have to compare two… exactly. You now have two competing theories. A tradition reaches me about an implausible event. The Sinai revelation. Okay? Implausible in the sense that we don’t know of events of that kind. Okay? Leave aside now all the definitions of miracles we discussed earlier; all those definitions are less relevant. Clearly, anyone who hears about such a thing naturally doubts it. It’s an event we’re not used to happening; on its face I wouldn’t accept such a thing. Okay, fine, but there are six hundred thousand, there’s a tradition, it’s reliable, everything’s fine, and so on. Okay, so now I say I have two options. One option is to say that it really happened and the tradition really isn’t lying. The probability of that is the probability of such an event happening. Right? The product of the probabilities. Let’s say the probability that it happened is the product of the reliability of the chain and the probability that the first link correctly grasped the situation—or wasn’t lying, or understood the situation correctly, whatever. Okay. Now I have two options: either assume the chain is unreliable, and then it didn’t happen but was planted; or assume it happened and the chain is reliable. The probability that it didn’t happen and was planted is a small probability, because generally historical chains are reliable. Yes, father doesn’t lie to son, all those arguments. So let’s say it’s one percent, for the sake of… just a second. Fine, broken telephone—let’s say I accept everything, there’s a one percent chance it’s wrong, but that’s a small chance; ninety-nine percent that it’s right. But the alternative isn’t any stronger either, because the alternative also has a terribly small probability. And in the end, the event itself is an event that is implausible. So what’s the chance that it happened? So with the chance that it happened—what do you think the chance is that such a miracle happened a priori, without testimony, without anything? The chance that such a thing is true is—I don’t know—very small.

[Speaker E] It’s like the medical test that’s ninety-nine percent accurate for a very rare disease.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, a bit similar, right. Ah, good, yes, it really is similar. Right, exactly. Ah, it’s exactly the same effect, I think—now that you mention it, that’s true. The claim is that there’s some chain whose reliability is, say, ninety-nine percent, but the event it’s meant to confirm is an event whose plausibility is no greater than that one percent of unreliability. In that situation, the reliability of the chain is worth nothing. Maybe that formulation is actually better, because yes, it’s the fallacy we talked about once on one of the earlier occasions: if I have a test that is ninety-nine percent reliable—ninety-nine percent—but the disease is one that isn’t common, something like a tenth of a percent or a hundredth of a percent, then that test isn’t worth a thing. Meaning, if they tell you you’re sick, there’s a one percent chance you’re sick. A test that’s ninety-nine percent reliable. Okay? Reliability of the test: ninety-nine percent. You get tested and it turns out you’re sick. The chance that you’re actually sick is less than one percent if the disease is rare—say, if the disease occurs in one out of ten thousand in the population. Okay? So here too, the reliability of the chain is, say, ninety-nine percent—I’m accepting all the arguments: father doesn’t lie to son, many people saw it, they couldn’t all have missed it—the reliability of the chain is very high, ninety-nine percent. Now I ask: okay, I’m using that chain as a probe, yes, as a measuring instrument, to verify the truth of an event whose probability is even lower. So the question is: what are the arguments about the chain’s reliability worth? There’s something very problematic here statistically. Now, there are formal formulations of this, but that’s basically the principle. That’s the claim. The claim is that I have a competition between two explanations, where one explanation really sounds very persuasive, but the second one is no less so. And whenever you want to adopt a hypothesis, you have to compare it to another hypothesis. Meaning, the question is always whether the alternative is better. It’s always what Shimon Peres used to say: what, what’s their alternative? Right? The opponents of peace—what’s their alternative? There’s also the possibility that there is no alternative. And that’s also an option, right? The fact that the chance for peace is small—Shimon Peres says, fine, but what’s their alternative? Their chance is zero. Fine, but maybe there’s no alternative at all as well? That too is an option. Therefore, everything has to be measured against the alternative possibility. Meaning, the fact that you show something is implausible still doesn’t mean it’s false. If the second option is even less plausible, then you’ve proved nothing. Right? Yes. Sherlock Holmes, rule number four.

[Speaker B] What? If I say what Sherlock Holmes says, it’s not true. If I say that this possibility is very implausible and this possibility is very implausible, then—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Then apparently the correct possibility is some third thing I didn’t think of.

[Speaker B] No, but suppose I can’t find a third possibility.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] It’s one of two things: either it’s false or it’s not false. Those are the two possibilities.

[Speaker B] Sure, in logic that’s true, but as a tool for evaluating reality it’s not true. No, it is true. I think that if you want, maybe there’s some third thing I haven’t thought of. Fine. But I’m saying: assuming these are two options that logically exclude one another, then there is no third possibility.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Those are the two options. Now, the question is: when you move to calculating probabilities, how can it be that the only two possibilities each have a probability of one percent? The event space has to reach one hundred percent in the end. So apparently there must be a third possibility that’s ninety-eight percent, because if each of the options is only one percent, then what? Then what actually happened in the end? The event space has to be defined over one hundred percent in the end. Something happened. So if there’s a one percent chance that X happened and a one percent chance that not-X happened, that can’t be. The probability that X happened and the probability that not-X happened always add up to one hundred percent. What? You need conditional probability. You need conditional probability here in order to handle this. That’s why I said there are more precise formulations of Hume’s argument. And I’m saying: once this happened—assuming this tradition has already reached me—the other ninety-eight percent is simply that no tradition reached me at all, that the tradition didn’t reach me. But if the tradition has already reached me, given that the tradition reached me, under that conditional probability, now I have to examine the two options: either it was planted and nothing ever happened, or it really did happen despite being implausible. Now the question is: we’re competing with conditional probabilities. When I compete with conditional probabilities, of course the probabilities will be bigger, but bigger to the same extent. Meaning, it depends on the unconditional probabilities. Okay? So therefore, basically there’s a kind of fallacy here that Kahneman talked about in other contexts, and these kinds of fallacies appear a lot. They tell you that something is implausible, and you immediately conclude that it didn’t happen. But that’s not true if the alternative is even less plausible; then the fact that it’s implausible doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Okay, that’s basically the claim. Arguments like this come up a lot. I think we talked about this last year too. Last year was it with the proofs for the existence of God, or two years ago? I don’t remember. Last year. So we talked there too—there are arguments like this from atheists: after you show them it’s not plausible that this whole world came into being without anyone creating it, they say: yes, true, but it’s even less plausible that there is a God who did create it. So yes, it’s implausible, but the alternative is even less plausible. Okay? That too is an argument.

[Speaker B] But even if there was a tradition, there’s a tradition that there was the splitting of the sea. Okay, but again—maybe it was pyrotechnics?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right. That’s also fine. So given that it happened, now we have to examine the two conditional probabilities, and basically both of them are problematic to the same degree. So it’s not clear how this argument can stand at all. That’s basically David Hume’s claim, translated perhaps a little more modernly than the way he writes it in that sentence, but the later formulations phrase it more precisely, and quite a bit has been written about it. There are disagreements—big disagreements—about this argument.

[Speaker E] But for example in this case it doesn’t stand alone. So it joins up with other arguments. You also talked about that—that once you’ve already proved that there is a Creator of the world through various logical arguments, then it’s no longer so much something from nothing.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Meaning now, again, maybe I’ll talk about it in another moment, but that’s exactly the problem. The problem is that here we’re not talking about Julius Caesar; we’re talking about an event that is a priori implausible. And in such a situation it isn’t right to infer from Julius Caesar or from ordinary historical events to a tradition that speaks to me about things of this type. There’s some kind of bias—or misdirection—in this transition we make from ordinary history to this mystical history. Of course, what this basically means is that as long as—at least as long as—I have not witnessed a miracle, I can never know that it occurred. In a certain sense that’s also a weakness of the argument that denies miracles, because it’s an a priori denial. In other words, I have no way to convince you that you’re mistaken. Because if I bring you testimony that miracles occurred, you’ll always dismiss it in the same way. So I have no way—unless it happens before your eyes.

[Speaker E] But if someone told me yesterday—someone I trust completely told me yesterday that he saw a miracle—then maybe the probability of it is already much stronger, no?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But the miracle itself—that’s the same question.

[Speaker E] But here you’re talking after two thousand years with that kind of time gap.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, but on a broad view, with many people, it held up for a long time, and so on—there are all kinds of arguments that strengthen it. Of course, it all depends on the question of the ratio between the probabilities: how much plausibility you give to the reliability of the chain versus how much plausibility you give to the event’s actually having happened. Okay? But this claim—what I want to say—is that it has a certain difficulty because it’s not vulnerable to any attack.

[Speaker B] Meaning, I don’t know how to refute you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] How much you—

[Speaker B] It depends how deeply ingrained it is in you. That is, he could say, fine, first of all, testify yourself that if you saw the miracle then yes, maybe—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying I don’t know. At least let’s suppose that if he sees the miracle, then fine. But as long as he hasn’t seen the miracle, then of course you’ll never be able to convince him.

[Speaker B] If he sees the miracle once, the more evidence there is and the stronger it is, then let’s say the balance of probabilities will change.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, the comparison between the probabilities can change. But I’m saying: it’s clear that from the outset—we need to understand, maybe there’s another point I have to explain here—we need to understand that the a priori probabilities we assign to the two options can’t really be calculated. Understand, this is just—not probabilities, but plausibilities. Right? There’s no way to calculate the probability that a miracle happened. What’s the sample space? How many possibilities are there? Let’s count them and do a statistical calculation. You can’t. There’s no way to calculate the probability that a miracle happened. I decide a priori that it seems implausible to me. Right? That’s basically the claim—the assumption that miracles don’t happen. Okay? I’m learning from experience, the assumption of induction—that’s also David Hume. Doesn’t matter. But that’s my assumption; it’s not the result of a calculation. Therefore I say there’s a problem here, because this can’t be put to a test. If it were the result of a calculation, then it wouldn’t need to be put to a test. If the calculation says here the probability is two percent and here the probability is twenty percent, then prefer that—why would you need to test it? The calculation says so. If there were another calculation in which the event had thirty percent, then I’d accept it. Obviously—there’s nothing to test. But here I’m positing a conjecture, I’m saying a hypothesis: there can’t have been miracles. A claim I brought with me from home. Okay? And assuming that’s the claim, then obviously you’ll also never be able to convince me I’m wrong, because I’ll always tell you that the calculation—in quotation marks, since it’s not a calculation—the picture will always come out such that I prefer the alternative that there was some problem here. Including, by the way, a situation where I myself saw the miracle. If I myself saw the miracle, I’d say: okay, apparently I got confused here, or I didn’t see correctly, or something happened, someone drove me crazy. Okay? Because there can’t be a miracle. Do you understand?

[Speaker E] People change their minds. What? People change their minds.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, they can change their minds, but I’m saying: in the statistical sense, the argument is on the statistical platform. Above the statistical platform, this is something that does not stand the test of falsification. Meaning, it’s not that if by chance you suddenly have an illumination and repent, fine—but I can’t bring you evidence such that we define in advance that if I bring it to you, you’ll retract. Understand—that’s the point. It may be that when I bring it, you actually will retract. But when I examine whether a theory is scientific, I don’t examine it after the experiment already happened. I examine whether it proposes an experiment such that if it happens, the theory will fall. And right now I already say that if it happens, the theory will fall. There is no such experiment.

[Speaker E] Why? If you perform a miracle for me, I won’t believe?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, because I’ll think it’s an illusion. Again, if I’m really extreme in denying the possibility of miracles, then no—such a thing can never be overthrown.

[Speaker E] Therefore. Plausibility.

[Speaker B] What—

[Speaker F] In any case, what is the meaning of testimony passed from witness to witness?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] What do you mean?

[Speaker F] Person from person.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’m saying, fine, I understand that a chain of that kind has important weight. But on the other hand, the event it wants to persuade me of—the one it wants to convince me about—is such an implausible event that it isn’t clear that the reliability of such a chain is enough. And here again I say: this is a question of a priori assessment, and so the person who remarked earlier was really right—that if I truly take it a priori that miracles can happen, why? Because I have already reached the conclusion that there is a God who created the world, and if so there’s no reason He should not also perform miracles. Then I don’t reject out of hand the possibility that miracles occurred.

[Speaker E] Logically I’ve reached the conclusion that He performed miracles—He created—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The world. Okay, one miracle I know. So I’m saying: if that’s so, then indeed my whole a priori calculation—or again, not a calculation, all my a priori assumptions and my a priori plausibilities—have already changed. So understand that what we have here is really a weaker argument than it appears at first glance. It’s an argument that ultimately does rest on some foundational assumption that somehow cannot be attacked. But by the same token, if my foundational assumption is different, and I do think there is a God, and I have no principled problem with the fact that He can also perform miracles, then I really have no obstacle to accepting it. Now here’s a very important point: if you bring miracles as proof for the existence of God, that’s problematic. This goes back to earlier lectures. It’s problematic because miracles get their force only if you assume in advance that there is a God who can perform them. But if you don’t assume that, then they prove nothing. Because in the end the conclusion will be the opposite: that someone fooled you, and that’s it. In other words, this can’t prove the existence of God; maybe it can prove His revelation and the giving of the Torah from Him to us, after I’ve already reached the conclusion that He exists.

[Speaker E] But from other sources—you talked about what you bring from home a priori—but you also have other grounds for assuming metaphysical things that aren’t necessarily God Himself. Maybe, for example, free will. Once I logically reach the conclusion that free will contradicts the laws of physics—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then again you’ll get to God.

[Speaker E] Because then you say: it’s already easier for me to accept miracles, because I perform miracles with every choice I make, and then it’s easier for me to accept that many people saw—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But then there’s still no God. So there was a miracle because miracles exist—what does that have to do with God? Because miracles could exist in nature. You still haven’t gotten to God. You’re only saying that even in nature I see miracles, fine. But that won’t bring you to God. So one way or the other, you can’t get to God that way.

[Speaker E] Got it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But you can’t prove God that way. Okay. I told you once about that story in Gedera, about that accident we had there, right? I told it in one of the previous years—how at one in the morning we got stuck, the whole family driving in the car, some girl came out from the side, boom, I crashed into the one in front of me—he braked, I crashed into the one in front of me—the car was totaled. One in the morning in Gedera with the whole family, eight people, on the way to Yeruham. Okay? I hadn’t even opened the door yet when a large empty vehicle stopped next to me—belonging to a neighbor of mine from Yeruham. We all got into it and drove home. What about the car? Ah, the car stayed there; we left the keys with some kiosk nearby that was open, and the tow-truck driver took it. That’s it. So afterward I gave a little talk to the guys in the yeshiva and said to them: I was supposed to prove to you the existence of God—look what a wondrous miracle, maybe that I’m some supreme holy man or something, so that from now on you’d have to accept everything I say—but what can I do, I’m an apikores. And my claim is that after all, once in a million something like that can happen, right? I didn’t check that there weren’t a million others to whom it didn’t happen and to me it did. So therefore it proves nothing. True, if I know there is a God, then I can ask myself why He chose me specifically to be that one in a million. Maybe it means something—maybe He wants to tell me something. That’s definitely a question one can ask.

[Speaker B] If there’s a God, who says He chose?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, no—I’m saying that here at least you can ask. That already depends on your conception of providence—the question whether He chooses, or whether it happens by itself, like we discussed in previous sessions. But here I’m willing to hear the discussion. But to prove from this that there is a God? How? It proves nothing at all.

[Speaker F] Ah? It’s the other way around. If you believe there is a God—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So that’s what I’m saying: once there is a God, then you can prove the Sinai revelation. But to prove that there is a God—you won’t be able to do it here. Okay? So basically what I want to say is that yes, Hume’s argument is an argument worth thinking about. But on the other hand, you need to know that it depends very strongly on our initial intuitions, on our initial assumptions. Now I’ll give you an amusing example, because I still want to get to it. I brought an amusing example. I have a secular friend—we’ve been very good friends for many years, and we like philosophizing about all kinds of things. He was traveling in South America. He traveled there; I have all kinds of stories about his travels in South America—interesting stories with lessons. But one of them is that he got to some village, I don’t know, in Bolivia or somewhere like that, and he told me that there the story is that there are hundreds of thousands of people who saw the Virgin reveal herself to them—I don’t know—before their very eyes, appearing over some mountain there in the area, in their district, or something like that. A story passed down from father to son for several hundred years. That’s it. Which means that one of two things follows: either, if I adopt the argument—not the Kuzari, I now already know that it’s not the Kuzari, it’s Sefer Ha-Ikkarim—then I’m now supposed to believe that the Holy Virgin revealed herself to them there in Bolivia, or, if I say it’s a lie, then that means I also can’t know anything about the Sinai revelation. One of the two. Because the fact is that things like this can be planted in history. Yes—Our Lady of Fatima, in Portugal. There it starts with three children, so that’s not much of a trick—it’s not before a multitude—but the story continues with seventy thousand people afterward seeing the sun dancing and the moon turning, as a result of the Virgin’s revelation. So everyone—seventy thousand—saw it. Like that.

[Speaker B] Some of the people who were there said they didn’t see it.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Oh really? Then I don’t know. Again, I didn’t go into the details of the description. But there was something there that became mass testimony too, not just the three children. So again, the fact is that—let’s put it bluntly now—look, the planting of a lie into a historical tradition is something we know. There are examples of it, I think, definitely. Miracles—I’ve never seen. I mean, I don’t know, maybe there are, maybe there aren’t, but I haven’t seen them. Now if I have to choose which of the two possible explanations I give to this chain that transmits testimony about miracles to me, it seems to me that Hume’s conclusion is the obvious one. Okay? Because all in all, things like this happen. Now I want to show you an amusing implication of this whole business, and I don’t know how much we’ll get through, but it’s worth thinking about. Afterward you’ll have something to think about on Sabbath. I have that same friend, the great rationalist—I have many examples from him. This whole line of thinking about Hume’s argument in Gedera actually came out of various discussions I had with him too, and so on. I don’t even remember whether I happened to see it or whether he sent it to me, but he wrote some blog post, some piece. Take a look at it—it’s in English—but it’s interesting to see. It’s about something that happened to him personally. And I want to hear—I don’t know if we’ll have time to hear it already—but let’s think about it for a moment. So he has some company; he opened a consulting company that advises how to arrive systematically at inventions, at creative solutions, but to get there systematically. Systematic inventive thinking—SIT or something, I don’t remember anymore. Systematic inventive thinking—that’s the company. There, I even advertised for him. And he gives consulting all over the world to different companies, to IBM and to governments, and apparently people think it’s useful; I hope it really is useful, but people think it is. So he tells here about an event that happened to him quite a few years earlier—fifteen years before 2010. “Roni’s story in his latest post reminded me of,” never mind some earlier story, “what was probably the most dramatic moment in my fifteen-plus years of facilitating innovation. I have told this to people a few times, not many,” because never mind, “and they often don’t believe me, but I swear that this happened exactly as it is told here.” In other words, it happened exactly as I’m telling you now, although my friends don’t believe me—including the friend of his who is sitting before you. No, I didn’t believe him methodically. “It was a pro bono session,” he gave some consultation pro bono, not for payment, “in a city in the U.S. Midwest, and the objective was to find innovative ways to improve communications and understanding in the local community,” yes, there was some community there composed of many kinds of people, and there were frictions and tensions and so on. They held a session among all the sectors of the population in that city in order to try to see how to live together. “Which had been stressed to the point of intermittent violence. The organizers had attempted to statistically represent within the sixteen participants all the—” okay, because it’s written in Hebrew, I don’t know why I’m saying the numbers in Hebrew. All this just because it’s written in Hebrew—I don’t know why I’m saying it in Hebrew. He wrote the numbers in Hebrew, I don’t understand. You have to say it because it’s written as sixteen. Yes. It’s like once a note came from my son’s schoolroom, and the teacher ended the note with “gut Shabbat.” So I asked my wife: what does that mean—either he writes “gut Shabbos” or he writes “gut Shabbat.” What is “gut Shabbat”? Why not just “Shabbat shalom”? She said to me: every Sabbath in the world he writes “gut Shabbat.” But when “Shabbat” is written, that’s Shabbat—when he reads it, he reads the final letter as an s. Yes, of course. Okay. So there were sixteen participants, all sectors of the local population by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and whatnot, and they did a terrific job. It was the most heterogeneous group imaginable. They were all active, well-intentioned people from every sector of the population, from all kinds and varieties of the population. The first day went well, and on the morning of the second day we opened with an exercise. The group sat on chairs in a circle except for one person who stood in the middle. That person was asked by me to recall something he remembered from the first day. Then to choose another participant, who, after he finished telling something from the previous day, would call on someone else sitting in the circle around him. That other person would come into the center of the circle and sit in his place. I asked them to stand up and sit in his place and so on. Each person in turn looked around after speaking, searched for someone who hadn’t spoken before, and sat in his place. We continued until one of them stood up, turned to me and said, ‘That’s it, everyone has spoken.’ That’s it, everyone has spoken. Nobody spoke, there was silence, so I started giving the group my innovative facilitating bottom line. I started talking about the lessons I wanted, as facilitator, to derive from this. The first lesson: who says you can’t call on one of the participants a second time? Why did each person choose someone who hadn’t spoken before, and once everyone had spoken you stopped? I didn’t say each person had to speak only once or that everyone had to speak. Somehow this was kind of taken for granted in the group, but I never said such a thing.” He wanted to show them that they make all sorts of assumptions even though he didn’t state them. “But as soon as I said that, one of the participants”—C, African-American, so politically correct; that was probably from the period before people said it this way, there’s even an apology in parentheses here—said, and I quote word for word because I will never forget the moment: “Hey, nobody has picked any of the black people here yet.” There were six black people there in the circle; no one had turned to any of them to speak. They turned only—out of sixteen, that’s a pretty large percentage, six out of sixteen—and one declared it was over, and everyone understood that it was over, including the facilitator himself. It was obvious that everyone had spoken, so it had to end. Now all six black people sitting there had not spoken at all; no one had turned to them. So he says: we all looked at one another. I literally couldn’t close my gaping mouth as I looked around at the sixteen faces. The woman was right. There were six black people in the group and not even one of them had been called to stand up and speak. And worse, when the last non-black person declared there was no one left to call on, none of us—including the attentive, experienced facilitator—noticed. Including the experienced facilitator of the group. I was in the room and forgot. No one said a word; it was obvious to everyone that everyone had spoken.

[Speaker C] Including the black people themselves.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] The black people—I don’t know whether they stayed silent because apparently it was embarrassing, until one of them stood up—

[Speaker C] One of them, a woman, stood up.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But this was an amazing phenomenon. So even now as I write this I’m ashamed to admit it, but that’s what happened, and none of the explanations quickly offered by the participants could change the basic fact. In some important sense of the word, we simply did not see some of the people in the group—literally, we simply did not see them. Six people whom we did not see. Okay? What? And this is before our very eyes?

[Speaker C] What? Visibility gorilla. Okay. Type that into Google and you’ll see things like that.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. In any case, his claim is that there was something terribly strange here. Now afterward he moves on to moral lessons and also to other lessons—not necessarily moral ones, but a kind of blindness we have toward phenomena we don’t notice—but I was interested in something else. I saw this blog post—I don’t remember if he sent it to me or I saw it—but in any case I sent him a response afterward. I told him: I don’t believe this happened.

[Speaker B] Neither do I.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t believe this happened.

[Speaker B] He made it up completely.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Exactly. And one of two things: either you made it up in order to teach us a moral lesson, or you made it up—no, this was before America of ’95, something like that. ’95 in the Midwest. ’89, ’91 in America.

[Speaker B] I don’t believe you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. In any case, one of two things. Okay, one of two things: either you’re lying. Why? That’s what I told him: either you’re lying because you want to push the moral idea in the story or illustrate an interesting principle, and you’re also doing little tricks by saying the lesson is not the moral lesson but a logical lesson—blindness and so on—but basically you want to push the moral point; or something happened there that you probably missed—actually they did speak, or they didn’t speak, and people didn’t think everyone had spoken at all; it only seemed that someone said everyone had spoken and all the others accepted it too. I didn’t hear the other sixteen say that everyone had spoken. I didn’t hear everyone agree. I’m only feeding off you—the tradition, yes?—your tradition, which says that all the people there—or at least all the white people—said that everyone had spoken and nobody made a peep.

[Speaker D] And what if out of the sixteen, out of the ten white people, maybe one perfect idiot stood up and said, okay, everyone spoke? And the black people too, and the black people too don’t react at that stage.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] So there, that’s another suggestion. Another possibility: maybe there was one idiot, everyone else laughed at him, they didn’t think he was right at all, and that’s why they didn’t react, and that’s it.

[Speaker D] They didn’t like the game.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Right, so we have lots of very sensible explanations, right? Now let’s compare the probabilities. I told him there are two possibilities. One possibility is that it happened—but it’s a very implausible event, right? Then I say—just a second—then I say that the chain is a reliable chain, okay? But the event is very implausible. It’s exactly Hume’s problem, right? And now there are two possibilities: either to believe you that it happened because you swear—he swore that it happened as he tells it. Okay? Again, I’m not sure an oath means much for a secular person—I don’t know how much an oath matters—but the second possibility is that something happened here: either you’re cheating, or there was a mistake, or maybe only you are mistaken. After all, I didn’t hear all sixteen. You tell me that all sixteen also agreed that everyone had spoken—that’s only you telling me. So that’s one person, not many. So why should I accept that?

[Speaker B] Yes, it could also be that he had a biased impression—he thought everyone agreed.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, so I’m saying either he’s lying or the impression is biased.

[Speaker B] As someone who lived in the United States for two years before that, I’m telling you it’s one hundred percent bluff; there’s nothing to think about.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] No, it also depends where, I think.

[Speaker B] No American would miss—

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Six black people—there’s no such thing. It depends on—

[Speaker B] I assume it depends where.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Fine, what, they all mix together? Never mind. The point is that it’s a very low probability, let’s say.

[Speaker B] By the way, today there’s a black president.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Yes, I—

[Speaker C] I know, but what does that have to do with anything? Besides, mixed marriage. The rate of mixed marriage in the United States… never mind, according to the interpolation, according to the interpolation, in the United States it was lower than in South Africa. You’re saying that in the eighties the rate of interracial marriage

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] between blacks and whites in the United States was lower than in South Africa? Yes, if you’re talking about the speed, if you’re talking

[Speaker D] about

[Speaker B] speed

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] of the process happening, don’t go forward, go backward. From 1995 until today not that much time has passed, and today there’s already an American president, so apparently in 1995 it was still a similar situation. So let’s extrapolate, let’s go back to 1970, in America there’s no chance.

[Speaker B] A thousand percent bluff.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay, never mind.

[Speaker B] Meaning, you should just keep reading, okay, we got it, I lied to you.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] But take that extrapolation backward, not only forward, and you’ll see that you’re wrong. You’ll see that you’re wrong. Twenty years earlier the situation was certainly completely different. Fifteen, eighteen years later there’s a situation completely different in the opposite direction. Now decide where the middle point stands. You’re assuming that if fifteen years passed there wasn’t a significant change, but why would there be a significant change backward in fifteen years? Fifteen years back there was certainly a substantially different situation.

[Speaker B] So you think it’s real?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I don’t know, maybe yes.

[Speaker B] Look how they’re playing greenhouse games.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] In short, this is exactly—what I want to say here—this is exactly the argument about miracles. Now this friend of mine told me a hundred thousand times cousins of Hume’s argument about miracles, doesn’t matter, kinds of arguments of that type. Now I raise this point to him, I say, listen, don’t confuse me, I saw it—what do you mean? I was there, I saw it. I tell him, first of all, it’s possible that you saw it and you’re lying; that doesn’t tell me anything. But I say, it’s also possible that you didn’t really see it, you’re confused, you interpreted it incorrectly—the probability of that is no smaller than the probability of the event itself. Which didn’t convince him. Now you can say one of two things: either the man is not honest, basically, or Hume’s argument really isn’t as strong as it looks. What? Because if I’m in some place, or if I trust that chain in a meaningful way, very nice, all the probability calculations are wonderful. I believe it. The whole question of a priori belief—we already said that’s all a matter of what initial assumption I come with. No, no, I’m saying, I’m broadening it now. What, someone who was there—that’s first of all. Now I’m saying: I also trust the chain. I trust the chain. Tell me about probability calculations—the probability calculation applies also to someone who was there, like I said before, because he can say maybe I made some mistake, maybe I missed something. So there you accept it? So now I’m saying it also about the chain. Now that’s food for thought; now you can try to analyze whether I can also present this in a somewhat more formal way—where Hume’s argument breaks down. I won’t do that here in the one minute that’s left. What I just want to say is: take it home, think about it on the Sabbath, because it raises an interesting question. That is, there are many cases where probability calculation says something is wrong here—apparently probabilities, I mean likelihoods, not odds—and in the end we still accept it. Are we always really fools, or is there something here beyond these cold calculations? Maybe I’ll end just with an article I read not long ago, which is on the other side of these pages for some of you; afterward I realized I’d photocopied it on the back of that article and on blank pages. But it’s an article by David Enoch, which I read a week ago, where he talks about the difference between two kinds of evidence. Let’s say someone testifies that a bus from a certain company caused a traffic accident in a certain city. Okay? Usually we accept the testimony, okay? That’s scenario one. Scenario two: there was a traffic accident involving a bus, we don’t know from which company, but ninety-eight percent of the buses in the city belong to a certain company, Blue Bus, okay? A certain company. Okay? That, of course, we do not accept as an argument in court. Now the assumption that a person who saw the company is correct—you could say that’s also something like a ninety-eight percent chance. He could have been mistaken; people miss things. Every lawyer knows that eyewitness testimony isn’t something you can really rely on all that well, right? At least from the non-eyewitness testimony of my wife I know that, because she’s a jurist. So I say: then the chance that this witness is reliable is, say, ninety-eight percent. But there too there’s a ninety-eight percent chance that it’s a bus from that company. This is a different case; it’s not a case like ours. I’m saying here too there are two scenarios. In both cases it’s ninety-eight percent. The case—the testimony of the person whose reliability is, say, ninety-eight percent—we’ll accept, while the statistical likelihood that the bus belongs to that company at ninety-eight percent we will not accept. Now why not? The probability is the same probability. Why not? Why do we accept this evidence and not accept that evidence? Is it just convention? Hume’s story—the question is, a city that has such-and-such a percentage of black people and such-and-such a percentage of their involvement in crime, so if I testify that a black person committed a crime, what’s the chance that it really was a black person who did it? No, here it’s conditional probability. Here it’s conditional probability. I’m talking—no, I’m saying something else. These are two cases that aren’t—two different cases. I’m not talking about a woman who testified when the percentage of buses is high. Two cases. Case one: in another city a woman came—or a person, doesn’t matter, a woman—and testified, or he testified, that a bus of a certain company did it. That’s all. That company isn’t even the majority there at all; there are lots of companies, doesn’t matter. There is—the probability after calculating all the probabilities is ninety-eight percent, because there is the reliability of the testimony and so on; it’s not certain she saw correctly, maybe there’s a company with a similar name, doesn’t matter. Let’s say there’s a ninety-eight percent chance she’s right. Usually that testimony will be accepted. In contrast, another case, different, not the same thing. A city where we know there was a bus accident, there are no witnesses. Nobody knows. But ninety-eight percent of the buses belong to a certain company. So I want that company to pay, to pay. It won’t be accepted. It won’t be accepted. Certainly not. Judges work with probabilities all the time. The probabilities are not here. In the test of whether something happened because of an accident, or some liability of judges. I write it for them in terms of probabilities. You write in terms of probabilities, but they need something called an additional indicium, some further element. Meaning, you need one more thing, even a weak thing, to strengthen it. And by the way, there is a statistical calculation that shows why a weak thing can turn something like this into something very significant, but that is connected, by the way, to Kahneman’s fallacy. But let’s leave that for now. Fact is, he’s a jurist, and I also spoke with others—testimony like this, Tzvi maybe can tell us, I don’t know—they will not convict the bus company on that basis. By the way, in Jewish law it’s the same. Because. Again, again. If they had seen a bus from that company already driving on the street at that moment, that’s fine. But if there’s nothing, we don’t know anything, we only know that ninety-eight percent of the buses are from that company, that’s exactly the difference from a camel eating. No, they know, they know there are camels. That’s the additional indicium, that’s the additional indicium, that’s exactly the point, because it changes the whole calculation. Doesn’t matter, but it strengthens it significantly. Exactly. Okay, but that’s a different discussion. So fine, think about it. So this is Ben Azzai, like with Rabbi Akiva, someone comes and says to logical reasoning… someone comes and says… I want to finish this point, there are a few more things here. I’ll tell you where it stands. There’s a huge difficulty—Pnei Yehoshua asks it, Rabbi Akiva Eiger asks it, everyone asks it. The Talmud says in tractate Bava Metzia on page 100: ‘The burden of proof rests on the one who seeks to extract property from another.’ What’s the case? The case is where there is doubt about the facts. For example, they exchanged a cow for a donkey, the cow gave birth, and we don’t know whether it gave birth before or after the sale. That’s factual doubt, not legal doubt; it’s factual doubt, and about that they say, ‘The burden of proof rests on the one who seeks to extract property from another.’